Among the new information that went into the update was the basic text of the congress or the “Theological and Pastoral Reflections in Preparation for the 51st International Eucharistic Congress.” It is a lengthy treatise on the Eucharist and the Church’s mission. Continue reading →

After yesterday’s upgrading of key WordPress plugins to fix a cross site scripting vulnerability, the WordPress team released version 4.1.2, which it described as a critical security release.

“WordPress versions 4.1.1 and earlier are affected by a critical cross-site scripting vulnerability, which could enable anonymous users to compromise a site,” the WordPress team said in a blog post announcing the release. The release also fixed 3 other security issues including an SQL injection vulnerability in some plugins.

I got the notification of the new release at past midnight. Years back, that would have meant that I’d need to stay up very late, download the latest release, upload the files to the server and perform the upgrade for each of the site I’m running. Continue reading →

InfiniteWP allows you to manage multiple WordPress sites without having to log into each one of them. It simplifies and centralizes upgrading of plugins and themes and backing up of files and databases. If you run multiple WordPress sites, you should install it.

THE day after super typhoon Yolanda battered Cebu, developer Albert Padin of Sym.ph went to their office on Escario St. to play games and work on some personal projects. Saturdays, Padin said, are days when their team does hackathons on projects that do not involve their day-to-day jobs.

While combing through news and social network updates, Padin read a call on geekli.st for developers to pitch in coding skills to build a system to help in relief efforts. Since he already had a team that was ready to build things, Padin said they decided to hold a hackathon to build a website to help in relief efforts.

They started the hackathon at 2 p.m. on Saturday with the goal of wrapping up by 5 p.m. They finished at 10 p.m. instead because they worked on 2 things: 1) a system that can help track the search for missing persons and 2) a site that can centralize relief and rescue information in the different areas ravaged by super typhoon Yolanda.

They later closed the person finder service and redirected people to the Google People Finder website. Padin said the Google system was better and the people running it had experience using it in previous disasters. Continue reading →

WERE you among the hundreds of people stranded in parts of Metro Cebu Saturday night? A strong and sudden downpour caused waist-deep flooding in several areas of the metro.

Flooding has now become all too common not just because of the sorry state of our drainage system and our explosive growth but also because of the weather. Climate change is upon us and its bringing disasters along with it.

One thing that empowers communities in dealing with disasters like widespread urban flooding is technology.

Before technologies like mobile phones came in, disaster preparation was a “failure,” said Dr. Cedric Daep, the head of the Albay Public Safety and Emergency Management Office (Apsemo)

About ten years ago, I built a WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) mobile news site. This was at a time when the cellphone to aspire for was the Nokia 7110, a slider phone made even cooler when a similar device was used in the Matrix movie.

At that time, the Sun.Star website signed a content agreement with Smart for SMS and WAP news and they needed a WAP mobile site. Nobody among the website staff then knew how to build a WAP site. Being a sucker for always trying to learn new stuff, I volunteered to build it.

I finished the WAP site in time for the launch after a 3-day development marathon done after I finished my work at the Sun.Star Cebu copy desk, fueled by more than a pack of Marlboro reds a day (I was still a heavy smoker then) and guided by a phonebook-thick Wireless Markup Language (WML) reference for the Artus Netgate.

To show it off, Flickr has a slider on its homepage that allows you to calculate how many photos you can store in your free allocation, depending on the resolution. If you store 8-megapixel pictures, the resolution of the iPhone 5, you could store up 436,906 photos.

STATE OF CITY SPEECH AS EBOOK. Scan the code to download Mayor Paz Radaza’s State Of The City Address. CLICK ON PHOTO TO ENLARGE.

Lapu-Lapu City Mayor Paz Radaza will be giving her State Of The City Address in Hoops Dome in Lapu-Lapu City this morning. What’s different about her speech today — from her previous ones and from the speeches local government executives have been giving and will be giving this month — is its digital twist — the speech can be downloaded as an e-book via phone scanning at the venue.

Radaza’s team at City Hall asked InnoPub Media, the journalism start-up I co-founded with my wife, Marlen, to set up a system that will allow the City Government to offer the mayor’s speech as a downloadable report.

Lapu-Lapu City will also launch today it’s own version of “A Guide To Cebu 2012,” the electronic guidebook on Cebu published by InnoPub Media with the strong support of Smart Communications, Inc. and partners like Ayala Center Cebu, Marco Polo Plaza Cebu, The Islands Group, Department of Tourism, Cebu City Government, among other partners.

The downloadable e-books are just the start of digital initiatives in Lapu-Lapu City. More initiatives done in partnership with InnoPub Media will be announced in the coming days.

The AFP article, which was written by a human, discussed how a group of new companies use algorithms or mathematical procedures run on computers to turn large volumes of numeric data into articles.

A pioneer in the industry is Narrative Science, which was spun off from a joint research project at the Northwestern University Schools of Engineering and Journalism. The company said its first “automatically generated story” was on a Northwestern Wildcats baseball game.